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A prediction in 2009 that Ubuntu usage was going to grow in the face of Red Hat's Linux operating system dominance could easily have been laughed off. Yet that's exactly what Ubuntu has been able to pull off, thanks in part to developers and growing adoption of cloud computing.

Developers are ahead of the Ubuntu usage curve

Like many, I was quite surprised by results from the 2009 Eclipse User Survey that found strong adoption of Ubuntu on developer desktops and production servers alike.

Survey respondents selected Ubuntu on their developer desktops more than three times as often as RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and Fedora combined. While surprising, this result could be explained by the fact that Ubuntu is free and positioned as a user-friendly desktop alternative to Windows. On the other hand, RHEL is a for-a-fee product targeted primarily at deployment servers, not desktops.

According to the 2010 Eclipse survey, Ubuntu usage on the developer desktop had increased to 18.3 percent, from 14.5 percent in 2009. Additionally, Ubuntu usage on deployment servers at 12.6 percent usage narrowly beat out Red Hat's 12.5 percent usage.

In another data point, RedMonk analyst Stephen O'Grady analyzed data from Hacker News consisting of 1.7 million entries. O'Grady explains, "This dataset is interesting not because it is representative of developers as a whole, but rather because it's a community of technologists who are collectively ahead of the curve."